“Not even to your fiancée, Countess Alexia?”
“No; not even to her.” To Alexia least of all, he thought.
Gastineau smoked in silence for a few seconds, inhaling the smoke slowly, as though formulating a plan of explanation. “I am like a man newly risen from the dead;” he spoke deliberately with a curious tenseness; “or rather, like one born in manhood instead of infancy. Life has come upon me so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that I am bewildered. I cannot look ahead yet, cannot order my existence.”
“I can understand that,” Herriard commented.
“Whether to go back to the old life,” Gastineau continued musingly, yet characteristically alert; “or to start an entirely new one, to carve out a fresh career; to conquer another world, rather than to throw myself again into the old arena with its sordid dust, its contemptible applause? That is the question,” he raised his tone, “to go back to the wrangling, the quibbling, the stench of the Courts, the knocking of sense into and prejudice out of the butchers’ skulls of twelve greasy tradesmen, the blunting of one’s wits against the Judge’s shield of complacent stupidity and short-sightedness, the disgusting obligation to win a ruffian’s or a sharper’s fight against a decent fellow; to be jostled all day by glib, shabby lawyers’ clerks, reeking of cheap cigarettes and bristling with impudence: to be at the beck and call of any swindler who wants to ply his trade with impunity, fortified by counsel’s opinion; then to go down to the House of Commons as special pleader for a bill which one knows is to rob one class in order to bribe another; to bustle through life with an axe to grind, and to cajole every useful fool into acting as a grindstone, faugh! is it worth it, all over again? No; I feel I must fill my new lungs with a fresher atmosphere.”
“You forget the rewards, Gastineau,” Herriard said, wondering how far the other was in earnest; “the rewards which were admittedly within your reach.”
“Rewards!” he burst out contemptuously. “Fancy me a Judge. How long do you think my tongue, my spirit, would let me sit on the Bench? The Woolsack, which my flatterers promised me, do you see me there? Could I school myself to prose and mouth, and stage-manage the mummery of their Lordships’ House? No, Herriard. This is a new birth of mine. I may drift back to the old trade; but if my heart was ever in it—which I doubt—it will never be there again.”
“After such an indictment of a vocation which is mine too,” Herriard observed, with a doubtful smile, “it is perhaps as well that our offensive alliance is coming to an end.”
Gastineau glanced at him sharply, as though in search of a lurking sarcasm. “The intellectual side of our profession, as it should be, is one thing,” he said quietly; “the practical scrimmage, as it is, is quite another. It has amused me to help you, to have something of the fight without any of the dust. Now——” he gave a significant shrug, and lighted another cigarette.
To Herriard it seemed unwise to pursue the delicate subject further. It was evident that his release from the partnership was forthcoming, and that was his great desire. “You have not explained the mystery of your recovery,” he said.